January 17, 2012

The theme shared by the display of little-known paintings (at least on the East Coast) by the eccentric San Francisco painter and collagist Jess (1923-2004) and of artworks and objects made collected or inherited by the poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) is the often polymorphous nature of talent.

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The exhibition also includes an attempt at assemblage that reflects Bishop’s admiration for Joseph Cornell; two paintings by the Key West primitive painter Gregorio Valdes as well as folk-art sculptures of South American derivation. But beyond Bishop’s own art, the most resonant inclusion is the small, skillful undated oil sketch by her great-uncle George Hutchinson that records a view of the Nova Scotia farm where she spent the happiest years of her childhood and inspired her 64-line “Poem,” published in The New Yorker in 1972. Toward the conclusion of this homage to immediate and remembered visual experience, one line especially encapsulates Bishop’s sensibility: “how live, how touching in detail.”

April 08, 2011

“This is the house of Bedlam,” begins Elizabeth Bishop’s lovely strange poem, “Visits to St. Elizabeths”: "This is the man / that lies in the house of Bedlam."

Ezra Pound was a patient at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., from December 21, 1945, to May 7, 1958. Here is a partial list of the poets who visited him: A. Alvarez, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, e. e. cummings, James Dickey, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Stephen Spender, William Carlos Williams. Visiting hours were from 2:00 to 4:00 PM every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, and when the weather was fine he would sit in the garden. Often the memoirs and recollections of those who visited him mention that he was eating fruit, and that his shirt was loose. He talked about translations, gave rules for poetry. Perhaps there is nothing more charismatic than a poet in a madhouse.

April 01, 2011

I confess to being late to the party on Scribd.com. At first I thought it was a repository for journalists' primary sources (court documents, transcripts, etc.). Then a friend mentioned the site featured thousands of unpublished works of fiction, with several writers critiquing each other's work. It's both of these things, and, due to myriad other uses I have yet to discover, Scribd's blossomed into a very large community of readers.

So we're pleased to announce our partnership with them, starting with a selection of recent work by Les Murray, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Christian Wiman and others. We'll be adding more poetry throughout April, so please check back often.

April 19, 2010

This year we've partnered up with GetGlue to give away a few of our favorite poetry titles to a couple lucky readers. If you're not familiar with GetGlue, it's a service and browser plugin that allows you to recommend books, movies, and music to your friends no matter where you are online. For instance, if you review Words in Air on Amazon, and your friend sees the book on Goodreads, GetGlue will tell your friend about your review. You can sign up and find out more info here.

GetGlue has devised a system where the biggest fans of a given topic - say, poetry - are deemed "gurus" and instantly qualify for our little giveaway. If you're a web-savvy reader of poetry, consider this a reward.

Joelle Biele is the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, to be published by FSG in 2011. We highlighted a few letters from the book earlier this month.

Sitting outside my poetry professor’s door, I noticed that the students from her advanced class were still reading the pink book. I had seen them, seniors probably, carrying the book before, through the corridors of the English department and onto the quad. Clearly, they had read a lot, had sophisticated tastes, and I was a student in the beginning class, hoping to find my way out of the dark and snowy rail stations of the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel but unsure what to read in its place.

Each week my poetry professor passed out thick packets filled with poems, poems like “My Cat Geoffrey,” “Directive,” and “Howl”—poems that completely floored me, as had the essays by Eudora Welty and E. B. White she'd assigned in Composition the year before. Anything she had us read was good, and these students still carried the book, which meant it was doubly good, so I had to spot the title without being too obvious. There was a certain coolness factor, after all. A student came out of her office, another went in, and we all shifted seats. The girl next to me rifled through her bag, and there it was, the pink book with the light green picture and the plain black letters: Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979.

Either later that week or the week after, I took the bus to Harvard Square and bought the book I still read now, excited to have what I thought of as my first real book of poems. I was eager to sit down and read, eager to see what I might discover, if it would be the kind of book I would want to read in one sitting, and if I would want to carry it, too.

April 08, 2010

On March 9, 2010, FSG published Henri Cole's Pierce the Skin, a collection of poems selected from his body of 25 years' work. Henri tells us a bit about the difficult process of choosing the poems that appear in the collection.

Last month I published my selected poems, Pierce the Skin, containing sixty-six
poems from the past twenty-five years. While putting it together, I used the
selected poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney as my models.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Selected
Poems was published in England
in 1967, and until a friend gave me a copy two Christmases ago, I didn’t know
it existed.At just over a hundred
pages, it is a model of self-restraint.Though some of my favorite poems from her first three books – “The
Weed,” “Love Lies Sleeping,” “The Unbeliever,” “Chemin de Fer,” and “Anaphora”
– are not included, I found this unexpectedly liberating. Time would correct
things, it seemed to say, if I made my own mistakes.

Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems, 1966-1987 (which I bought when I was a young man)
showed me the way to excerpt from long lyric sequences, letting parts represent
the whole, as ash in an urn can represent the body. So with these two books on
my desk, I was strict with myself while excerpting my own six books. The
manuscript I submitted was only about 125 pages.

The fact that neither Bishop nor Heaney included new poems
in their books seemed to support my choice to hold back new work for my next
collection, which I hope to turn in soon. If I’d included a handful of new
poems, I feared they might never belong anywhere, like geese left behind on the
pond after the seasonal migration.

I think publishing a Selected Poems can be a moment of reckoning. I hope readers will
see that I’m here to stay. My book is dedicated to Jonathan Galassi, my editor,
because I feel he’s kept me on the map of American poetry, in whatever
classroom or skyscraper it hangs.

April 07, 2010

In case you missed it, Jonathan Galassi gave a long interview to Poets & Writers magazine last summer. Here are a few choice excerpts.

What were the hardest lessons for you to learn when you were a younger editor?
One of the really hard lessons was realizing how much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you misjudged it. Maybe it didn't get the right breaks. One of the hardest things to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There's luck in publishing, just like in any human activity. And if you don't get the right luck—if Mitchi [Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don't get the right reviews, or if books aren't in stores when the reviews come, or whatever the hell it is—it may not happen. That was one of the hardest lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective.

Another really hard thing is that, as a young editor, each book is like your baby. I remember wanting to publish Peter Schjeldahl's biography of Frank O'Hara so desperately. I lost it to some other editor who paid more money, and I was melancholy about it for months. Of course the book ended up never being written. [Laughter.] But at the time I felt like a piece of me had somehow been sawn off. I wanted to pour myself into that project so much, and it takes time for that sense of wanting, and identification—which is what publishers live on, really—to relax a little. I see my young editors going through that and I empathize so much. But you have to learn to let go of things. That was a very painful lesson.

But when I was young I had so much reverence for writing. Elizabeth Bishop was my teacher in college—she was my favorite teacher, and I revered her work, and I loved her as a person very, very much—and I remember that when she would invite us over for dinner I would get almost physically ill. It was this combination of conflicting feelings: excitement, discomfort, a sense of unworthiness. It mattered so deeply that it made me almost physically ill. Caring that much was painful. I don't know if that's a lesson but it was certainly something where the intensity of my devotion was overwhelming.

April 02, 2010

Elizabeth Bishop -- a prolific and artful letter-writer, in addition to her obvious talents as a poet -- composed an astounding number of letters in her publishing years with The New Yorker. In 2011 FSG will release a collection of these letters, Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Joelle Biele.

Richard Kelly flew up to New York last night, and by the time you get this you probably will have received a samba record and a letter from me. I think he said he'd met you...

Before he left, he handed over a lot of odds and ends, the way our visitors usually do—match-folders from the Yale Club, extra US cigarettes & Kleenex, paper-backs, etc.—and also the March 13th New Yorker. My own copy of course hasn't got here yet, and won't for several weeks. If he hadn't given me that March 13th one, and I hadn't looked at it last night, instead of this letter you'd be getting a long poem called CRUSOE AT HOME... It is a bit unnerving, isn't it... Or is it just "great minds," even so far apart? Well, they aren't really exactly alike, because mine is in the first person, more realistic and un-organized, etc. I'll send it someplace else, and I'll send you a copy when I have time to make copies.

I re-read Crusoe not long ago and found it morally appalling, but as fascinating as ever. Have you ever read the travel memoirs of Woodes Rogers, the young captain who picked up Selkirk?[i] The parts about him are brief, but very moving.

April 24, 2009

Today on Graywolf Press Friday, Fiona McCrae, director and publisher at Graywolf, returns to discuss the life cycle of a poem. You can find the first part of her post here.

Every quarter the staff likes to get a report on the permissions activity for the period. It’s fascinating to look at the poems and poets that are most in demand: Tony Hoagland, Dana Gioia, Natasha Tretheway, Linda Gregg, Eamon Grennan, Claudia Rankine, Nick Flynn, Katie Ford. If I had to come up with one quality that unites the most requested poems, it’s clarity. When we are selecting our poets, clarity is not a quality that we have in the front of our minds. Instead, I think we are looking at originality, complexity, innovation. Perhaps some of our more opaque poets need to read in the context of their other poems: the collection as a whole teaches the reader how to fully understand the work. Or perhaps they need more time to filter into the wider cultural currents.

At the top of our permissions list are the poems of William Stafford and Jane Kenyon. And when people phone me to ask for a poem to read at a ceremonial event (and even when I am wanting one for an occasion) it is often to these poets I turn. It’s not necessarily that they are my favorite poets; it’s that they seem the most share-able. Their work has a quality of inclusiveness that Dana Gioia has described in his essay about Elizabeth Bishop (“Elizabeth Bishop: From Coterie to Canon," from Disappearing Ink). He talks about Bishop’s appeal to a wide spectrum of tastes, and he notes how many of her poems contain the word we. I immediately thought of Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” and Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come,” which are our most requested poems. Both include the reader in lines at the end of their poems. Stafford with, “I thought hard for us all” and Kenyon with, “God does not leave us / Comfortless…” In these two gestures, each poet, one could argue, significantly increased the audience for their poems.

Tanya Chernov: I’m the translation editor and poetry co-editor for the LA Review.

In all seriousness, I am fortunate to work with a group of my fellow grads from the Whidbey Writers Workshop at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on this fine and well-established literary magazine. With their hands full at Red Hen Press, Kate Gale and her husband, Mark E. Cull, have brought on a gaggle of us Whidbey folk to breathe some overzealous post-MFA energy into the LA Review.

FSG: Do you think poetry has changed in form, audience, or accessibility with respect to changes online in recent years?

TC: Certainly the poetry genre has broadened its audience with the newfound accessibility offered through online mediums. Though many online publications may have initially carried a “less than” stigma, there are many fine electronic publications now able to surpass the burgeoning obstacles presented by the economic crisis, under which so many wonderful small presses and literary magazines have crumbled. With many literary magazines accepting less than one percent of the submissions they receive, online submission managers and e-publications can really help a writer feel somewhat in control of their literary destiny.

With more and more people internet-stumbling upon things they would never normally be into, surely some will occasionally find scraps of poetry here and there. I mean, statistically there must be someone out there who does a Google search for “Nudes” and ends up with a copy of "Bonnard’s Nudes," and decides that reading this well-published poem written by the Pacific Northwest’s homeboy and short story writer Ray Carver is much more worthwhile than looking at porn. This is good.

In addition to growing accessibility, poetry has been unavoidably influenced by a rapidly mutating web-vernacular, constantly creeping into the diction and format of many contemporary writers. In my opinion, this is bad. It is neither fresh nor futuristic—just lame. Call me a purist, but having a poem hop all across the page willy-nilly does not add anything enhance its meaning. None of us will supersede e.e cummings’ abilities here, so let’s all just stop trying. It's tacky.

FSG: Where do you think poetry will go, or how will it change in the coming year(s)?

TC: Look, poetry will never again be as widely accepted and well-loved as it was in the Islamic Golden Age, but let’s not dwell on the past—there is much to look forward to. Though it isn’t really my thing, performance and slam poetry is quickly gaining momentum among the young urbans, the pouty hipsters, and the angsty après-emo music crowd. Like I said, my theater days have long been finished, but I don’t mind slam poetry taking the limelight for a while if it means that we traditional poets can share the side stage for a while.

Poetry continues to be obscure even in literary circles, but much is changing in the poetry world. Boundaries bend and snap, forms rise to the surface and sink back interchangeably, subject matter grows ever-more daring. People no longer balk at Elizabeth Bishop’s thinly veiled reminiscences on her lesbian lifestyle, Anne Sexton’s candid tours through mental illness, or Robert Lowell’s rejection of a privileged, upper-class lifestyle. Confessional poetry sure has taken on new meaning these days. Now we’re talking about things like dead babies, transgendered journeys into the fashion underworld, and monkey-born hemorrhoid epidemics. Nothing is shocking anymore, so poetry must work to be remarkable in more craft-based ways, making it infinitely more challenging and interesting. What will remain constant as poets find new ways to reach the world with their artfully crafted messages is that poets posses a well-honed ability to condense, infuse, and create with mathematic precision and foresight.

...it's our hope that our volumes—most with
new introductions by poets of today—will make it easier for new readers
and old to find their way into these extraordinary books. Due to the
unique power of the form, most of these works seem to acquire an even
greater resonance as time passes. It may just be that the impact of deeply felt, finely wrought language is even more intense in a less literate age.

April 18, 2007

It's just occured to me to wonder if Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States, Pulitzer Prize nominee, author of 19 books, is frustrated that his Wikipedia entry begins with an almost-immediate reference to his appearance on The Simpsons? (I suspect, though, from my very limited interactions with him, that he would take it completely in stride.)

Here's a poem of Elizabeth Bishop's that Pinsky recorded for us in Boston. It's called 'At the Fishhouses,' and contains an image I love, one of Bishop singing Baptist hymns to a curious seal.

Cole says in his introduction, "It's surface subject are the bright streaks of gray in Lotta's hair, but it's real subject is about time, is thinking about making a truce with the passage of time, and what we get is a kind of timeless act of one woman washing another woman's hair..."

April 04, 2007

I cannot believe we have waited four whole days before getting to our first Elizabeth Bishop reference. Shame! The only excuse I have for it is that this recording of Thom Gunn reading Bishop's poems 'Varick Street' and the posthumously published 'Sonnet' is remarkable. I won't do his readings any justice by describing them--no one wants to read a paragraph filled with blathering about pauses between words and lovely British accents--so it's probably best if you just click on the player below. Both were recorded at FSG's 50th anniversary party in 1996.

I couldn't find a copy of 'Varick Street' online (which is where the title of this post comes from), so I've provided a visual tool to the right. If you have, like me, been hauling The Collected Poems from apartment to apartment ever since you bought it for a 100-level course in college because you loved it too much to get rid of, you are all set. The poem is on page 179. For everyone else, you can buythebook if you prefer your poems in written form.